I know we just finished up Halloween, however, the shopping season is upon us.  Major retailers are setting up their black Friday campaigns.  Whether you’re a small retailer or a large conglomerate, it’s time to put into action your online marketing plan for this holiday season now.

You shouldn’t use the same coupon week after week because it will turn people off.  I won’t buy something this week if I know that there’s going to be another 20% off everything coupon next week.  Have something really on sale.  You won’t get everyone buying it, but I suspect you’ll get better conversions since it will be more meaningful and it will capture the customers attention.

Last season, people were worried about their jobs and the looming recession.  Well guess what, many more of us are out of work, and are counting pennies.  What this means to you is that you’ve got two types of customers.

The first are those who are looking for deep discounts and will buy and store the presents.  In fact, they’ve been buying presents since last Christmas.  They are patient and will wait until the exact right price for the exact present comes along.  For these people, again, the highly targeted discount is very useful.  Amazon has their daily deals, and they often sell out.  So if you have multiple products, have one as a fire sale and see how well it converts.

If it doesn’t, perhaps most of your clients are the second type.  They have a limited budget and are waiting until the last minute to get the fire sale prices.  In fact, they may be more than likely to go into stores and try to negotiate better prices.  For these people, you need to give them a good reason to buy online.  Perhaps free shipping will be their tipping point.

Know your customers and know that it’s a tough market out there.  So get your holiday emails out there so you’re the one they want to buy from.

I’ll save subject lines for another time. But today, let’s talk about targeting and your reason for emailing. Some people believe in the shotgun approach where you send out an email to everyone hoping that enough people will open to justify the return on investment.
However, the problem with doing that often is that you numb your audience. At first, everyone is like a happy puppy and opens every email from you. But as time goes on and they see an email that has nothing to do with them, they stop opening, and worse, often unsubscribe.
So how can you keep them engaged?
First, look at what you promised them when they signed up. Did you offer an informative newsletter once a week? Are you still sending that or are you just sending ads?
Good email campaigns require a lot of self-discipline. It’s fine to send the ads occasionally as long as it doesn’t detract from the useful information.
One suggestion is to work with a copywriter (you can find good ones at elance.com or guru.com), and create 50-60 canned emails of information pertinent to your business. If you want to do a daily or 5 days a week, then increase the number accordingly, and shorten the mailing length.
Most good ESP’s (email service providers) have the ability to set up triggered emails. So once a person signs up, it should trigger a welcome message, and then start the series of emails as per your agreed upon frequency.
So what about the ads. Best practices dictate that you should target the ads to some kind of demographic. If the ad is for women’s shoes, obviously, sending it to women only is the better plan. If you have many brick and mortars, and you’re opening up a new store, sending an announcement of the grand opening to the whole list doesn’t make sense. Border’s made that mistake recently and sent out a special coupon to everyone even though they meant to target a few select zip codes. You can learn from their mistake, and identify where your email will be most effective.
So what if you don’t have this information? Part of list management is regular emails every 3-6 months asking people to log in and update their information. It should be handled carefully. You’re building up a relationship with them. So first you get their name and email address, and you build up their confidence when you only send them what they ask for. After awhile, you state that you need them to re-activate their account, or that you need them to verify information. And you ask them for zip code and gender. Perhaps later on, you can ask for household income, and other interests. Another is asking them top opt-in to special offers. This gets them to their account information on your website, and allows them to fill in more information while either opting in to get 3rd party ads or opting out. Remember, this is a long term process, and you need to treat the person’s information with respect.
When you do this, you’ll have people opening and reading your emails again in no time.

Recently, there were headlines that open rates are dropping in 2007 (From DMNews) which in a nutshell says that the trend is decreasing open rates from 16.11% to 13.98%.

The article said that click rates stayed the same, but they decreased from 3.18% to 2.9%

So, are people getting more cynical? Are email spam filters getting more restrictive and therefore, they’re not even seeing the emails? Have we gotten bombarded by useless newsletters that only contain requests for more money or ads that we just ignore them?

Here’s more to chew on. DMNews also had an interesting article on e-mail marketingas being a rising star. In a nutshell, the author Jordan Ayan feels that e-mail marketin gplans should be recession proof. And he’s correct.

If you have a solid list of people who opted in to receive your information, and you’re regularly providing useful and pertinent information, they’re going to open your emails, and click through to get more details for the snippets that caught their attention. And if they feel they have a relationship with you, then they’re going to be open to receiving ads and requests to purchase.

And to conclude, target, target, target.

I’m helping keep them focused on quality while still making solid revenue ROI. And there’s the rub. Companies will need to find a way of making money while sending out and making accessible useful information, otherwise, they’ll stop doing it. Or they’ll turn everything into a pay only model.

My goal with this site is to provide guidance in this crazy, wild world of online marketing.  I’ll tell you what worked, what didn’t, what email program you should use, and how you can master email marketing strategies.  I will start a podcast soon so it can become a conversation between us.  I look forward to your comments which will help make it truly a dialog.

Thank you and Welcome!